By now, you’ve probably endured so many reports about last week’s “Daniel Tosh made a rape joke and a woman got mad then everybody argued about it” story that you’re dying to to just curl up in a hot shower and have a good long cry.

The Left is determined to force us to swallow this whole “rape culture” crap, dammit.

Just like they’ve been trying to get comedians to drop race jokes and handicapped jokes since the 1980s.

This battle — which has all the elements of a thrilling cause: sex, death, violence, race, liberty — has, against all odds, become excruciatingly boring, because it has reached a perpetual stalemate. It’s like lingering death overtime.

Comics continue to offend, offended weenies continue to declare their offended-ness, comics apologize (or don’t), and next week or next month another comedy controversy springs up like a weed.

Nowhere in this article (or in the comments that I read) did I see any complaints about the coarsening of our culture. None of the “edgy” comics is as funny to me, at least, as Herman Melville in The Confidence Man. Who among the alienated youth of today could even read that masterpiece of satire, let alone match its wit and incisiveness? I wrote a bit about censorhip here: http://clarespark.com/2012/07/31/censorship-bohemia-and-the-big-sleep/. My main point as a libertarian on these matters is that we lack a critical context to analyze what is happening to our heads. And moreover, it is taboo to even discuss sadistic humor, misogyny, or antisemitism, let alone the big life and death questions. Such material is not considered to be appropriate for the dumbed down audience for adolescent humor.

I contend that gun rights are the only real way to put a stop to rape. I’m tired of all the liberal media posturing on the topic of rape, when they were the ones who have disarmed the public in so many parts of the world. More guns, less rape!

As for myself, the rest of the world constantly takes cheap shots at Orthodox Slavs in general and Serbs in particular. As such, I claim the right to take cheap shots at anything and everything else that has it coming!

Yes. It was so very droll when Adam Carolla jokes about violently raping screaming women and throwing them down a volcano.

That’s very funny. He must be a very tough guy if he needs to express that kind of sadism. He would not live long if he tried that with some woman I know. tough guy that he thinks he is not withstanding.

I always laugh at guys who say “so and so isn’t such a tough guy” and then immediately, often in the same sentence, proclaim their own toughness and ability to kill anyone who messes with their wife/sister/kids/dogs/car/what have you. Who says self-awareness is dead?

Forget jokes you can’t say anything that might be considered by some less that perfectly respectful to gays. An Italian soccer player Antonio Cassano (a total meathead idiot like just about all pro soccer players) was fined 15000 euros for being less that completely pro-sodomy having been asked about rumors that a gay journalist was banging some of his teammates:

The problem with so called humor is it leads to changed values, via desensitization. Amazingly I hear and read about women asking if it really hurts men (or the minimize with a comparison), about men being “raped,” or deliberately injured in their groins. Most will continue to enjoy the exploits of a female lead in a movie/series, who, if she did this in real life should be seriously hurt and/or jailed. Instead, these women (most I’m afraid) are so entirely unaffected they’ll eventually pass on slight values and not firm values. They are affected by comedy. Lines should be in place. Those who think they can get back inside the “wire” (Iraqi/Afghanistan term for on base) to safety are kidding themselves. They are phychologically changed for the worse. Loose values get passed to kids. It lowers their ability to care, and it’s used on spouses when times are tough.

Anyone who went to the “R” rated movie “TED” should have known what they were getting into. The movie was marketted as coming from Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy fame, and there were significant warnings at the theaters that there would be raunchy humor, nudity, and implied drug use.

If you have watched even 1 episode of Family Guy, you know that everything is far game for a joke.

Family Guy comedy has become syndication fodder; in conservative Tampa, Florida (host of this year’s Republican convention), Family Guy is packaged between unwatchable “30 Rock” and ran-off-the-rails “Big Bang Theory.”

Tosh.O is on Comedy Central. Last time I checked my cable bill, I had to pay to receive CC. So I can pay to be offended by frat boy highjinks, or, now here is a novel idea, I don’t have to watch the show.

My mileage to be offended may vary. I am a conservative, church-going, overweight white guy, married to a “hot” wife. I am caricatured in just about every sitcom on TV, as the only current demographic that can be the butt of all jokes and still not offend any protected group.

Humor is a strange thing. Who would ever have believed that The Producers could pass muster?

Then, a few years ago, Prince Harry got in trouble for wearing a “Nazi” Halloween costume. So – he was dressed as a monster. There were people as Dracula, Freddy Kruger, and also real monsters like Jack the Ripper and Doctor Crippen. But somehow a Nazi costume was over the line…

And in a way I get that.

Jokes about ethnic groups. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they offend. A joke which exaggerates a flattering stereotype to comic effect is usually safe. A joke which reminds people of an ongoing problem usually is not.

Want to see the darkest, grimmest humor in the world? Go to a combat zone and talk to Soldiers and Marines. Laughing at death and dismemberment is how we deal with it. Taking it too seriously is the road to a breakdown.

Right on. Your comment took me back to W.W.II. In Italy, gray skies, mud, rain, death and wounds daily, and guys kidding each other, like: “If you lose your legs, after the war you can get around on a pogo stick.” Or, after heavy shelling, someone from the company c.p. crawls within yelling distance, asking, “Are you guys o.k.?” and someone yelling back, “No, we’re all dead.” And everybody laughing. It’s funny that I can remember things like that and I can’t remember what I had for breakfast.

My wife is a sort of a connoiseur of stand-up comedy. As a result, I’ve learned some things about comics that I would never have otherwise known, and some of these things are interesting, to say the least.

One of the more fascinating is that a comedian’s reputation with the public and his reputation among fellow comedians may be very different from one another. Some are popular with large audiences, but often those guys *envy* other comedians, who do more “edgy” humor, the stuff they could never get away with. Comedy, or jokes, usually involves the speaker surprising you in some fashion. Saying something unexpected, etc. And one of the ways to say the unexpected, one of the ways to easily surprise your audience, is to “go there” before anyone else has, before it’s been long enough for everyone to “heal.”

This sort of comedy can come in two forms. In the better sense, the joke is in some fashion a surprise, but it also says something about the incident involved, or at least isn’t directly offensive. The other sort is the one where they’re deliberately *trying* to be insulting, degrading, and whatever. Norm MacDonald is a good example of this sort of comedian. He does his act, and says outrageous, insulting, disgusting things about people (the one that stands out in my mind involves a pair of fathers at a gay pride parade comparing photographs of their sons having gay sex with their partners) and then he gets nervous laughter from the audience. The problem for me is that this isn’t humor, it’s (to my mind) a substitute for it.

I’ve never been able to watch more than 10 seconds or so of Tosh.O. I don’t care about pop culture much (the show is built around it, mainly what they find on the web) and so I don’t like it, or its TV-based cousin, The Soup. Gossip columns aren’t better for mocking people and trying to be funny: they’re still about celebrities who are more or less irrelevant, and they’re still ridiculously superficial.

The other comedian who’s been involved in a “controversy” recently is Dane Cook. Cook is (supposedly) heartily disliked by many of his peers, because he supposedly plagarizes much of his act (a no-no with comedians). When he’s doing his own stuff he’s not very funny, and when he’s doing Louis CK’s act (the guy he supposedly steals from; Mr. CK has been pretty vocal about it) he’s merely offensive and obnoxious, following in Louis CK’s brave footsteps. The joke he made about the Aurora shooting was rather stupid (it was built around the premise that the new Batman movie sucks, which opinion is apparently unique to Mr. Cook) and so if the movie had continued someone in the audience would have asked to be shot anyway. He combines 2 sins of comedy at one time: a) he’s offensive, and b) he isn’t funny.

Oh, one other thing that’s occurred to me. People’s view of what is acceptable has changed with time. The comedian Foster Brooks, who I used to see on the Tonight Show (I think) as a kid, could never do his act or get work, now. The whole schtick was that he was an drunk hobo. Nowadays, he’s an alcoholic homeless person, and people shouldn’t make fun of that sort of person…too many would be offended.

It depends on where you are. I was in England in 1991 on business and happened to have the BBC (radio) on in my hotel room listening to news and current affairs. A spokesman for a national group representing homosexuals announced that he and the people he represented were tired of hearing the terms “homosexual” and “gay” because they were “too bourgeois”; his group wanted to return to the terms “queers” and “faggots”. And that’s no joke!

I was astonished – and amused.

I don’t know if this proposal was widely adopted; I rather doubt it. Maybe a British reader can fill us in?

It’s surprising how comedy demolishes taboos sometimes. I still remember when we first heard a toilet flush on TV: when Archie Bunker flushed after a visit to the bathroom. I still remember when we first heard the word “bitch” on TV: when Maude’s daughter told her off.

And I never imagined anyone could make animal abuse funny but any fan of WKRP In Cincinatti will remember the immortal words “As God is my witness, Johnny, I really thought turkeys could fly!”.